The new director of Spain's state-funded history academy has said that the official biography of General Franco will be amended to define the man who led the country for almost four decades as a dictator. 

Carmen Iglesias, the director of the Royal Academy of History, announced the move in response to a controversy surrounding the existing entry on the Spanish military leader in the institution's biographical dictionary which described the Franco regime as "authoritarian but not totalitarian". 

Speaking at a conference in Madrid, Ms Iglesias said that the 2011 publication would be corrected to reflect the dictatorial style of the man who ruled Spain with an iron fist from the end of the country's civil war in 1939 until his death in 1975.